Hi Maria,
this is a very interesting question and I actually have first hand experience with having a child admitted to uni in the Uk having graduated from the IB curriculum in Dubai. My son graduated last year in 2019 and wanted to study back at home in the Uk. Of course he was also born and raised in the Uk and only has a British passport. Yet, when he applied to unis across the Uk he was exclusively offered places as an international student. This was a shock for us as we had assumed that as a Uk national he would have been admitted as a national student. We did try to reason with the Unis by sending emails back and forth and even chatting to the admissions officer on the phone, and it turns out that the reality is that if you are a Uk national, but have ended your last years of education abroad, outside of the Uk and Eu, you are deemed an international student and will therefore have to pay the extra 15000 pounds of tuition fees every year. I do have a second child that is 3 years away from graduating, and I can definitely say that we are going to be sending her back to the Uk to finish her last year there, so that she will get admitted to uni as a national and won't have to pay the extra tens of thousands of pounds each year of uni.
Hope this helped.
